I have recently acquired one of these as well. It was our family's first computer aside from a commodore 64 (or lookalike) which was only the base unit (no cartridges of tape decks or anything)
I got
- base unit
- a Headstart monitor (all tough not exactly the same as memory tell me)
- a Headstart keyboard
- a stack of documentation, some is still inbound, the seller found it a day after I picked the machine up,
- 4 cdrom's number 1 tot 4, I recall there being a fifth cdrom, my brother tells me it contained music, however the second cdrom is scratched, this cd contains all the games that came with the system, I did manage to extract the folder structure thus far (I might send the disc away to a disc buffing service) Disc 4 is the rescue disc
- 2 cd caddy's one of which is broken
I lack:
- The 40 mb hard drive
- The original bus mouse, I can however use the mouse from my Headstart III machine
- The original boot floppy
However. The machine does not want to cooperate. I have managed to get dos prompt once, and I don't know how.
I want it to run from a xt-ide card with (256mb) CF flash card. I grabbed the one from the Headstart III where it shows up during boot but I have not used it to boot from due to the fact that the original HDD in that one is still alive. The IDE Xt card I use is a XT-CF Lite version 4.1 I got from Ebay in Italy.
Where that same XT ide card shows itself during boot on the Headstart III (which is a 286 10 mhz with 40 mb drive (Seagate ST-151) it absolutely refuses to show itself on the LX CD.
As the machine original uses dos 3.22 I got a 1.44 image with ms-dos and tried to boot that to no avail, the previous owner said it booted from floppy with dos 5.0 but I managed to forget that specific floppy and I hope he'll send it with the books. (I put it down somewhere when I carried the computer to my car and after that I forgot it. Dumbass me)
I tried however a dos 5.0 boot disc to no avail and currently I'm looking at a ms dos 6.2 (original disc) with on screen "MS-DOS wordt gestart..." (Dutch) and a blinking cursor but that has been there for half a hour already.
I have tried 2 other floppy drives that fit, (because of the missing pin being banked out in the cable I have not tested it with the rest of the stack of 3.5 drives I have) but the results are the same.
I pulled the BR2325 mobo battery and volt tested it, dead as a doornail. I have ordered one and hope it will be here by Tuesday. (could it be that this is preventing to load fully into dos?)
I have also placed the XT IDE back into the Headstart III to test it, still works but not booting yet. (not a priority as of yet)
I have tested the cdrom drive (sony CDU 510 12) but it was disconnected and when I did connect it didn't insert the caddy all the way. It took me a while to get the caddy out again. If this drive works I'll be glad, if not I'll try a old 2 or 4 speed generic one of if possible, use a CF card with two partitions and dump all the data from the cdroms into the D drive and fool the machine that way.
Pff, thus far I've been tinkering for a full day now without much progress.
I did however did a backup of the 3 working cdrom's and have that on drive. Hooray for that
db